The safe choice for vice-president was not J.D. Vance. He arrived on Donald Trump’s presidential ticket with little political experience and plenty of baggage. During his two years in the Senate some senior colleagues found the Ohio freshman’s strident opposition to Republican policy orthodoxy presumptuous. And more than a few Republican lawmakers and donors still privately acknowledge they would have preferred someone else. Yet the vice-president, the third-youngest in American history, has proved adept at a role that often ends up as a political dead end. And Mr Vance, seen by America’s allies as a divisive figure, is casting himself as a uniter of his party’s fractious factions. He argues that he was uniquely placed to bridge the gap between the “techno-optimist” and “populist right” MAGA tribes.
“Both our working people, our populists, and our innovators […] have the same enemy,” Mr Vance said during remarks at the American Dynamism Summit in Washington on March 18th. That enemy is globalisation and cheap labour. He argued that restricting the flow of people and goods, while loosening regulations and lightening the tax burden of companies and investors, would encourage innovation and benefit workers and entrepreneurs alike. “We can only win by doing what we always did: protecting our workers and supporting our innovators,” he said.
Whether tech leaders—whose businesses benefit from the free flow of goods and services and federal support for scientific research—will buy this new vision as it moves from theory to reality remains to be seen. Mr Vance’s bridge may buckle under the weight of its own contradictions. But if the Republican Party could indeed fold working-class voters who feel nostalgic for a past age into a coalition with techno-optimist entrepreneurs, that would make MAGA a new kind of political movement.
If Mr Vance completes his four-year term as vice-president, it will be the longest he has held a job since serving the same stretch in the Marine Corps after high school. After a tough childhood, the Ivy League-educated lawyer worked at three venture-capital firms in six years and published his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy”, when he was just 31. The book’s success expanded his already ample access to elite circles, and his time as American progressives’ favourite conservative led him to believe many affluent Americans looked down on the people he grew up with.
Mr Vance, whose career in elected office was half as long as Mr Trump’s, didn’t bring the Washington know-how of Dick Cheney or Mike Pence to the vice-presidency. Yet he has taken on a big portfolio, divided into four roles: spokesman, dealmaker, project manager and talent scout.
Mr Vance is aware that his most important task is staying on the same page as Mr Trump, which is never easy. Yet, as part of a MAGA vanguard putting more intellectual scaffolding on Mr Trump’s movement, he relishes making flag-planting speeches (and sometimes actually planting flags).
In February he delivered a pair of addresses castigating European governments for their shortcomings. The leaked Signal chat demonstrated that Mr Vance’s private and public views on foreign policy did not diverge, even if he doesn’t always agree with the president. But like the elder millennial he is, he also takes time to do battle on social media, including with an Economist correspondent, and to speculate about the IQ of a former British government minister. His Greenland trip united these instincts: to show loyalty to his boss by making his wilder ideas seem substantive and to troll liberals and foreigners.
After nearly a decade of cable TV appearances, Mr Vance is adept on old media too. Though he lacks Mr Trump’s peculiar charisma, he is as talented a brawler. And the most important member of his audience agrees. “He is a feisty guy, isn’t he?” the president said on election night. “He really looks forward to it, and then he just goes and absolutely obliterates them.”
At the beginning of the administration, he worked on seeing through cabinet nominees to confirmation. With picks like Robert F. Kennedy junior, Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, the task seemed as enviable as Kamala Harris’s responsibility for solving the root cause of America’s immigration crisis. Nearly every one of Mr Trump’s cabinet picks made it through, and Mr Vance had to cast a tie-breaking vote only once. Much of this success was thanks to atmospheric pressure created by Mr Trump and Elon Musk. Yet Mr Vance quietly played a role by listening to uncertain senators and assuaging their concerns. “J.D. is a jack of all trades, and he has been instrumental in working with the Senate to help advance President Trump’s cabinet nominees and our shared agenda,” says John Thune, the Senate majority leader.
Ivy League elegy
Beyond Congress, Mr Trump has assigned his deputy to a mix of special projects. One of these tasks is crafting a deal that would enable TikTok to remain accessible in America, despite a law that ought to have forced its sale or closure by now. Another job is as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, the first vice-president in that post. Developing deeper ties with some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors at the same time will be helpful in the future.
In addition to these tasks, Mr Vance has left his imprint on the administration in his role as HR manager. Vance acolytes have taken influential positions beyond his own office, and he has also supported efforts to keep nominees in line with the Trump agenda. Before the election, in a joint interview with Donald Trump junior, the most influential Trump family member of the second term, Mr Vance said that they had a shared interest in “keeping the snakes out of the administration”. While Mr Trump senior is in charge of top selections, Mr Vance’s influence can be seen at the lower levels, in the thousands of jobs that the president would not personally vet.
To what end is Mr Vance doing all this? He was a Trump critic before adjusting both his style and his views during the president’s first term. Yet he had long been interested in politics. Before he found fame he became friends with conservative intellectuals known as “reformicons”, who sought to shift the Republican Party away from its pro-business image towards helping voters more directly.
“There’s an idea out there that a lot of this is opportunism. But I think that J.D. believes that US public policy, foreign and domestic, should be geared toward advancing the interests of the American working class and of the American family,” says Michael Strain, a conservative wonk at the American Enterprise Institute, who has known Mr Vance for about a decade. “He has changed his views on Trump personally but he has consistently filtered everything through the questions: Is this good for the worker? Is this good for families?”
Seen in this context, his dressing down of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was rooted in his view that a conflict involving America would hit poorest Americans hardest. Mr Vance—a vociferous critic of aid to Ukraine—believes in a restrained use of America’s limited resources around the world. His scepticism of support for Kyiv goes back to his time serving in Iraq. “It’s the same exact talking-points 20 years later with different names,” he said on the Senate floor when opposing aid to Ukraine in 2024. “The obsessive focus on moralism: democracy is good, Saddam Hussein is bad, America good, tyranny bad. That is no way to run a foreign policy.” His friends believe Mr Vance has been ahead of the political curve on Ukraine, opposing assistance for the country in the days before Russia’s renewed invasion in 2022, and that his strident tone will age well with time. His sharper edge, particularly when criticising Europe, is consistent with his own rhetorical transformation and Mr Trump’s anger about the continent not spending more on defence.
Yet there is a paradox here, too. Mr Vance’s own trajectory, from Hillbilly to the Ivy League, ran via service in the Iraq war. Not every question can be answered by asking what is best for the working class. Debates about how corporate tax-cuts might affect families, for example, have persisted for decades within conservative circles. What does nuclear modernisation mean for the working class?
Then there is the question of what happens after Mr Trump’s second (or maybe third) term. Mr Vance has been coy, recently telling NBC News that, “If I was like a central figure to getting the Russia-Ukraine crisis solved, who gives a shit what I do after this?” The RealClearPolitics polling average shows that he has a net-negative favourability rating. Yet he would be the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2028, if he chooses to launch a presidential campaign from within the administration. Mr Trump has held off anointing him as his successor, and recent history suggests that the president would enjoy watching several competitors vie for his endorsement. ■
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